Obituaries: Ivy Hoppe Rodriguez, Beverlee McKinsey

Ivy Hoppe Rodriguez never saw working in the orchards as hardship. Instead, she taught her children to enjoy the outdoors while picking prunes, grapes, hops, apples and cherries across the West.

"It would be like a big fun summer thing," said her daughter Karen Colombana of Santa Rosa. "We would go swimming after and have fun around the campfire. She just loved the outdoors and loved to travel."

Rodriguez carried that cheery outlook through the surgeries of her four-year battle with kidney cancer. She passed away at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital on Sunday. She was 70.

"She was an amazing, strong woman," Colombana said.

Rodriguez was born in 1937 on the Stewarts Point Rancheria and was a member of the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians. She initially was home-schooled and spoke only her native language.

When her family moved to Healdsburg and she enrolled in school, teachers discouraged her from speaking Kashia, Colombana said. She dropped out of Healdsburg High School in the 10th grade after becoming pregnant with her first child, Ernie, and married his father, Leon Hoppe.

They remained together for 25 years and had seven children, two of whom died in early childhood, Colombana said.

The family moved to Cloverdale in 1953, where Leon Hoppe worked in the timber industry. In the summer, the family and some relatives would pile in a station wagon and drive as far as Oregon, Washington and Idaho to pick fruit.

True to her passion for travel, the family lived in Reno and San Francisco before buying a home in Santa Rosa in 1963.

Rodriguez began working at the O'Connell and Vacu Dry Apple Canneries in Graton, where she remained for 31 years. The couple divorced in 1972. Two years later, Ivy met Rudy Rodriguez at a dance club. They stayed together 34 years until she passed away.

The couple loved the "danger and excitement" of rodeos, and "would do the rodeo circuit all over California" and Reno, Colombana said. Rudy Rodriguez is a foreman at a winery in Sonoma, where the couple lived.

Rodriguez was proud of her Kashia heritage and taught language classes at the Sonoma County Indian Health Project with other Kashia elders.

"At one point, we had four generations in the class," Colombana said. "She really wanted the people to learn the language or else it was going to die with her generation."

Rodriguez also took her children to annual celebrations on the reservation, including spring strawberry festivals and roundhouse ceremonies.

"She was always a happy person," Colombana said. "Even in the last years, she wasn't one to complain about anything."

In addition to her husband, daughter and son Ernie, Rodriguez is survived by sons Leon Hoppe Jr. and Robert Hoppe, both of Santa Rosa; daughter Sandy Pinola of Windsor; stepdaughters Estelle Rodriguez of Sacramento, Mikaela Rodriguez of Santa Ana, Regina Rodriguez and Constanza Rodriguez, both of Mexico; and sisters Inez Adams and Freda Davis, both of Santa Rosa.

Visitation is scheduled from 4 to 8 p.m. Friday, with a rosary recited at 5:30 p.m. at Daniels Chapel of the Roses, 1225 Sonoma Ave., Santa Rosa.

A service at the chapel is scheduled for 10 a.m. Saturday. Interment will follow at Santa Rosa Memorial Park's Shiloh Road addition in Windsor.

Donations can be made in Rodriguez's memory to the Sonoma County Indian Health Project Diabetes Program, 144 Stony Point Road, Santa Rosa 95407.

-- Shadi Rahimi

Beverlee McKinsey, veteran soap star

Beverlee McKinsey, an actress best known for roles she played on the daytime soap operas "Another World" in the 1970s and "Guiding Light" in the 1980s, has died. She was 72.

McKinsey died Friday at Olympic Medical Center in Los Angeles. The cause of death was complications after a kidney transplant, said her son, Scott McKinsey.

In an acting career of more than 30 years, McKinsey began in New York theater. She was an understudy for the Neil Simon play "Barefoot in The Park," performing the female lead, Corrie, a number of times in the 1960s. Robert Redford played the love interest.

She also performed the role of Honey in the London production of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" by Edward Albee in 1964. Uta Hagen played Martha and Arthur Hill played George in the production.

McKinsey moved to Hollywood in the late 1960s and had guest roles on prime-time television series including "Mannix," "The Virginian" and "Hawaii Five-O."

For some years she was cast in small roles in feature films, including "Bronco Billy," starring Clint Eastwood, in 1980.

Her first major role on daytime TV was Iris Carrington, a meddling villainess she created for the daytime soap "Another World."

McKinsey played the Carrington part for nine years starting in 1970 and was nominated four times for a Daytime Emmy award but never won.

She re-created the role of Carrington for "Texas," a daytime soap opera that launched in 1980 and aired for about a year. McKinsey's name appeared below the title of the show -- an extremely rare billing for soap opera stars.

Her next major role was Alexandra Spaulding, or "Alex," on "Guiding Light," which she played from 1984 to 1992. McKinsey's Alex was a matriarch and a force in the family business, Spaulding Enterprises.

"Beverlee played Alex as a regal, self-assured woman who dominated people with her power," said actor Rick Hearst, who played Alex's nephew, Alan-Michael. He is now a regular on "General Hospital."

McKinsey was born Beverlee Magruder on Aug. 9, 1935, in McAlester, Okla..

She graduated from the University of Oklahoma, where she majored in theater arts.

She married Mark McKinsey in 1956. They divorced three years later.

McKinsey was married three times. Her last husband, actor Berkeley Harris, died in 1984.